Email is the most important online service you use — it’s essentially your online passport, used to login to most apps you use — but it’s often the most neglected. Sure, we check our email all the time — you may even run emailing marketing campaigns for your business — but how much time did you put into finding the best place to keep your email? Have you ever thought about the possibility of needing to switch email services, and how much that would affect your life?

Now’s the time to think about it. Let’s take a look at the best email services out there today, and how you use them to make sure you never lose all of your email. And perhaps, you’ll find an email service that you like even better than you’re using right now. (more…)

The last few months have been a wake-up call for anyone who cares about privacy. But perhaps it’s just been another headline blocking your way to the last round of sports, because I’ll tell you one truth: the generation I’m part of just doesn’t care about privacy. We all knew Google and most free services were grabbing our data and serving us ads. We grew up with that routine, so much so that some of us learned to share online before we got into math. This behavior is so prevalent that the upcoming generations have their fates sealed already, with their pictures being exposed all over the internet sometimes before they’re even born. It’s like The Truman Show, with many, many Trumans.

Yet, I didn’t leave Google due to privacy, I did so because of its use of my private data. Using Google daily and being targeted with its ads is like having a bad fight with your best friend, when he uses your darkest shared secrets against you. After a chain of events, the dismissal of Reader and the new ads in Gmail camouflaged within your inbox, I decided it was time to jump out. That’s what I did and I’m here to tell you how.

Ever get frustrated finding emails from your team, or have trouble tracking down that receipt your colleague should have already filed for your business expenses? You don’t need a new app, you just need a new way to make your email more powerful. That’s exactly what SquadMail offers.

SquadMail can best be described as “Dropbox for email”, since it lets you share synchronized Gmail labels (or any IMAP email folder) with others. Instead of constantly CCing your entire team on every email, you can simply assign a shared label to it and it’ll show up in just the right place in your collaborators’ inboxes. If your team changes, you can simply add a new person to a label and they’ll have access to all the old emails.

Additionally, each label gets its own email address so that you can send emails straight to a group of people, or set up special inboxes in your email client for receiving newsletters, social network notifications or to sign up for web apps. Last but not least, SquadMail lets you synchronize Gmail labels and email folders with your Dropbox account. The service automatically extracts all the attachments from a certain label and puts them in the same folder on your Dropbox. Since the labels have their own email address this also makes it possible to email files straight to a folder on your Dropbox.

You don’t need to download or install anything to use SquadMail and it works with every email client, be it Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail or Thunderbird. SquadMail also doesn’t store any emails, and the entire synchronization is done with a secure SSL encryption.

Start Using SquadMail Today!

There’s no reason to use CC with your team anymore. Instead, signup for a free SquadMail account today and see how much simpler life can be with shared email folders! You can sync up to 3 email folders or labels for free, and then purchase additional synced folders for $2/month and share them with as many collaborators as you want. You couldn’t ask for a simpler or cheaper way to get your team working together right in the place you’re already working the most: your inbox.

We love Gmail here at AppStorm, but truth be told, there are a few things we wish were different. How about letting us attach files directly from Dropbox? Wouldn’t it be cool if my inbox was sorted by files, size and other filters? Is there any way that my unruly inbox can be tamed? And why can I not simply schedule an email to be sent later?

Don’t worry. There’s an app (or extension) for that! Here’s the very best apps to sort your inbox, manage your contacts, compose emails, and so much more. These tools are mostly designed to make the Gmail.com interface work better, but you’ll find great apps that’ll help you even if you use Gmail from other apps.

Email’s the default business communications app; most of us use it to collaborate with our colleagues without even thinking. But as you start sending more emails back and forth, email can get unwieldy, with important messages lost in the clutter. That’s inspired a whole generation of business apps that try to help us communicate and collaborate outside of email.

Why not just keep using email, and make it better for business collaboration? That’s what GrexIt, our sponsor this week, is designed for. They realized that email’s still the killer app for business, and set out to make it better by adding shared labels and tools to assign tasks and check their status to Gmail and Google Apps accounts. That way, you can archive emails with labels like “Support”, “HR”, “Accounting”, or your project names, and the emails will be automatically shared with everyone you’ve added to those labels. It makes collaborating with your team as simple as keeping your inbox cleaned up.

Then, since it’s just Gmail labels, you can use GrexIt even if you sync your email with Outlook, Mail.app, or your mobile devices. You can also integrate GrexIt with Google Chrome to manage your shared labels and more directly from Gmail, without having to open your GrexIt account.

If you’ve been wanting a better way for your team to collaborate but didn’t want to have to change your current email-based workflow, GrexIt is exactly what you need. We loved GrexIt when we tried it out for our review, and are sure it’ll be a great asset for your business.

Get GrexIt Half Off!

As a special offer for our Web.AppStorm readers, you can get a free first month trial of GrexIt, and then get a 50% rebate on your first paid month of GrexIt just by signing up at http://grexit.com/?source=REF_APPSTORM. Or, you can keep using GrexIt for free if your team only has up to 3 users and 5 shared labels. Be sure to give it a try this week, and see if it’s the tool you need to make email the ultimate killer app for business.

Emails are no longer merely a tool for communication between people. I don’t know about you, but my inbox is full of emails, both automated and purposefully typed, from a ton of different contacts, websites and even a few junk senders. From the company that brought you Priority Inbox, a feature that detects which emails are important and presents them upfront, comes a “new inbox that puts you back in control”.

Several weeks back, Google unveiled their new tabbed Gmail inbox. It frames itself as an easy way of separate different types of emails into multiple tabs. Let’s take a look at what it’s all about. (more…)

Like most people today, I prefer to save the majority of my files on cloud storage services, especially the work attachments I get in my emails. This helps me access my work files no matter where I am. For the past few days, I’ve been looking for a simple way to save all my attachments automatically to my Dropbox account so that I don’t have to upload them every time I receive an email. I did try IFTTT to see if I can create a recipe but it didn’t allow me to save the attachments in my Box or Dropbox account. It did save the copy of the email as text files, but that’s it.

Finally I found what I was looking for, in the form of Kloudless for Google Chrome.(more…)

The internet is not as safe of a place as we wish, and passwords are far from impossible to crack. If you want to be safe, you have to take every precaution and extra step you can in order to make sure no one get access to your online accounts and services. These days, the majority of online services use two-factor authentication as an extra precaution to protect your online accounts.

Let’s take a look at how you can enable 2-factor authentication on some of the most important services you use: Gmail and Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, and LastPass.

Anyone working with two or more computers, a phone and a tablet will know just how useful Google syncing can be. By signing into your account you can access the same information – emails, contacts, tasks and more – on multiple devices.

But what about if you have more than one Gmail account and want to share contacts between them? Forget manually copying and pasting, or re-typing out scores of names and address. Soocial is a service that can do the hard work for you.

The concept of inbox zero is nothing new. It is a nirvana-like inbox state that many people try to attain. We all know the feeling of glancing at a bulging inbox with emails that are yet to be read, more that need to be responded to, and yet more that need filing or deleting. Doing this by hand can be time consuming, but if you have thousands of messages to deal with, Mailstrom could be the tool to get you back on the right track.

Mailstorm is a new beta email app designed to help you keep your inbox under control. Lets see if it’s the app you need to take your unread messages in your inbox by storm.